A cautionary tale
For better or worse, “training”, as a bounded learning activity frequently taking the form of a workshop, is the predominant method through which development organizations impart new knowledge, skills and attitudes. All too often, however, such training is less than satisfactory, particularly when it comes to gender training. It is not that the “training workshop”, as an event, is in itself to blame, for it can serve as an effective learning strategy for certain types of knowledge acquisition.
This generally, however, has not been the case with gender training that has tended to make gender and development concepts technical and apolitical robbing them of their critical analytical power. Rather than engendering capacities for critical feminist reflection, the experience to date has been that gender training has effectively reduced gender and development to a technical exercise, namely remembering definitions, removed from its feminist roots and devoid of potential for transformatory change, the sort of change required to achieve gender equality.
Gender training workshops, in particular, assume that new knowledge, skills and attitudes concerning gender and development can be “transferred”. Even if participatory, learner-centred methodologies are employed as part of training, the contexts of training and their inherent contradictions – the role of the trainer as both expert and facilitator, using participatory but structured learning methods to impart radical and sometimes controversial ideas – are in many ways antithetical to communicating what are essentially critical concepts concerned with analyzing and addressing the subordination of women, particularly within the context of international development.
The de-politicization of gender and development as a result of the popular use of gender training has come about for a number of reasons. First, training workshops are primarily viewed as opportunities to impart knowledge and skills not as a “site of debate and struggle” (Ahikire, 2007: 40). For a number of perhaps organizationally historical as well as pragmatic reasons, disagreements in gender training tend to be smoothed over rather than embraced, explored and negotiated.
Second, and related to the first, the institutional contexts in which training takes place (i.e. the organization’s dominant view of poverty, inequity and development) directly and indirectly impinge on why training is sponsored (e.g. knowledge transmission through the memorization of definitions or knowledge generation through “debate and struggle”?). This, in turn, impacts on the intended use of gender knowledge. Is the goal to simply integrate “gender” into development work, thereby leaving the status quo intact? Or is to critically interrogate mainstream development theory and practice so as to transform “development” to be promoting the rights of both women and men?
Third, the role of the facilitator is critical. Training is performative. What makes for a “successful training” is as much about the ideas being imparted as it is on how much participants “enjoyed” the experience. This often comes down to how well the facilitator performed and didn’t upset the participants, for example, by challenging learners’ attitudes and views.
Finally, although we use the term facilitator (as opposed to trainer) to convey the idea that the person is a catalyst for learning, at the end of the day, the facilitator is looked upon for expert knowledge and experience. This requires a certain level of professionalism and maturity to know whether we can confidently put ourselves in such a position of power and authority based on sufficient knowledge and experience of gender and development concepts. Sometimes facilitators feel they need to establish their legitimacy and credibility and are unable to acknowledge their own limitations, such as a lack of knowledge, with learners.
As a result, facilitators face the challenges of encouraging and maintaining learners’ motivation and interest in gender issues whilst critically engaging them and engendering a feminist perspective as well as being knowledgeable whilst sufficiently secure and confident to own up to their own limitations.
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Learning a language: a metaphor for gender training
It is helpful to think of learning about gender and development analytical concepts as well as the roles of workshops and that of facilitators using the metaphor of learning a new language. As with a new language, we start with memorizing words but this does not make us fluent. To become fluent, we need to gain an understanding and appreciation of the meaning behind words, the often complex subtleties of meaning behind different words and how words (or in this case gender concepts) are related to each other.
When we learn a new language, such as English, we first learn and memorize individual words or phrases, such as “good morning” and will hopefully use it appropriately. Training workshops are an appropriate method for this level of learning: becoming familiar with new terms and their use. The facilitator’s role is to provide conceptual clarity, and therefore needs to be clear him/herself and able to communicate clearly.
As we become more confident with our English and learn other phrases, such as “How are you?”, we start to use these together with “good morning”, usually in the same order with little divergence. In gender training, after first learning the term “gender”, we learn to use the term to build other analytical concepts, “gender division of labour”, “gender needs” or “access and control”. Again workshop context is appropriate. The facilitator needs to be able to convey the meaning of such concepts and their analytical value.
As our confidence in English increases, we start to substitute phrases and use English idioms to convey certain meanings. We understand the differences of these phrases in their meanings and when to use them. For example, with a stranger or in formal occasions, we may say “Good morning, how are you?” but in more familiar situations we’ll mix things up and say “mornin’, how’s it going?” We are developing a fluency not only with the words but their meanings, what they convey and when to use certain ideas.
Similarly, learning about gender and development concepts is developing a fluency in being to analyse and communicate the social relations of gender. To do this is not just a matter of memorizing terms, but understanding why and how they are important. It’s one thing to know the definitional distinction between “sex” and “gender”, it’s another to know why it’s important to make such a distinction, how such distinction help us in our strive for gender equality and how it is related to other gender analytical concepts such as “gender division of labour”, “gender needs” or “access and control”. And these understandings need to be grounded within feminist understandings of the subordination of women. This is where training becomes difficult and is a limited learning method. As opposed to asking participants to memorize definitions, we are now asking them to analyse social relations of gender. Strengthening analytical skills needs to happen in the real world, not just in training workshops. Going back to the English example, we learn the subtleties of the language from practising, engaging and self education.
As gender training facilitators, it behoves us to be fluent ourselves in gender concepts before we start to train others. Not only do we need to understand their meanings, we need to know how to use them, how to communicate their meaning and usage and how to facilitate learning processes for others to become fluent.
Moreover, becoming “fluent”, whether in a language or gender analysis, should be inspiring and catalytic by providing insight. Our role as facilitators should be to create a generative process that motivates learners to seek further knowledge and understanding.
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